Video sharing web services are known which enable end users to upload videos captured using their mobile telephones to a web site. The videos may then be viewed by others who access the web site. An end user is able to specify whether his or her video is to be publicly available to all visitors to the web site or whether it is to be shared only by a specified group of individuals.
Such video sharing web services are used for many purposes such as sharing videos of family events between family members who live in different countries. Other examples include sharing videos of educational lectures or entertainment performances. Typically video is captured on a mobile phone and at a later time is uploaded to the web service. Others are then able to download the video from the web service.
Typically the videos recorded by mobile phones have low resolution and poor quality for a variety of reasons. For example, the mobile phone may shake unintentionally during video capture as the end user is typically not expert at video capture. Also the position of the video capture device with respect to the scene being recorded and the lighting conditions and other environmental conditions may be badly selected. In addition, the communications link between the mobile capture device and the web site may be poor during the upload process and this can further reduce the quality of the video.
In addition, when several users have captured video of the same event the resulting videos at the web site are difficult to select between. It is then a time consuming and complex process for individuals to view each of those videos before being able to decide which provides the best result. If an individual is to download each of those videos from the web service before selecting the most appropriate one for his or her purpose download link capacity is used. Also, storage capacity is taken up at the web service and bandwidth is used to upload all the videos to the web service.
The embodiments described herein are not limited to implementations which solve any or all of the disadvantages of known video sharing systems.